They called them black beans, although no one in the Waco Times newsroom could explain the origin of the term. They were just “Lou’s Black Beans,” dreaded equally by one and all. They appeared in the form of memos typed on scanner paper, the coded sheets that were threaded through IBM Selectrics when there were not enough computers to go around—and there were never enough computers, not in the crunch of afternoon deadline, not when one was the low woman on the totem pole. Forced to use a typewriter to file her copy, Marissa belonged to one of the last generation of journalists to type -30-to denote the end, but of course she could not know this in the summer of 1982. She also couldn’t know that she would give up on newspapers by year’s end, although the briefness of her tenure would not keep her from bragging, many years in the future, that she had once typed her copy and put -30-at the end.
Black beans arrived in one’s mailbox cubby, innocuous slips of paper until unfolded. Then they became the black plague. Death to advancement, death to career, death to ambition.
Marissa, Go down to the park and write up a little something on the groundbreaking ceremony for the new public restrooms (no big deal). Best, Lou
Marissa, There’s a program over at Baylor for young entrepreneurs, in which kiddos learn the ins and outs of business. But please—don’t give us a lot of cute stories about kids. Focus on the business basics. Best, Lou
Marissa, Where does navel lint come from? And why do I have so much of it? Best, Lou
The last one never happened. But it could, it might. Marissa came to believe that she would spend an eternity chasing down every idle thought that rolled through the mind of Lou Baker, lonely as a tumbleweed, something Marissa had believed she would find in Waco, Texas, knowing very little about the state’s topography before she arrived there for a job interview on a sweltering April day. She feared that she would spend the rest of her life in Waco, Texas, because she had graduated in the middle of a recession and all the good newspapers insisted that applicants have at least five years’ experience and she was never, ever going to have five years’ experience.
Marissa was twenty-one years old.
The day she turned twenty-two, in late August, she found another black bean in her mailbox:
Marissa, Wouldn’t it be interesting, as summer comes to an end, to find out what is in the various lost-and-found boxes at motels, restaurants, the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame, et cetera? Best, Lou
No, she thought reflexively, as if the question were not rhetorical.
She made a dutiful effort to shoot it down. First rule of a Lou Baker Black Bean: Shoot it down. She called the motels. Mostly clothing. She called the restaurants. Clothing, a pair of binoculars. She called the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and they seemed strangely proud of having nothing—nothing!—in the lost and found, as if part of being a Texas Ranger were making sure that a person was never, ever, separated from a beloved hat, fanny pack, or billfold.
But when she dutifully reported back to Lou that there really didn’t seem to be much in the various lost and founds, the city editor asked for a list of the places she had called and scanned it with a puckered frown.
“I don’t see the Waco Inn on here,” Lou said.
That place. “I thought you wanted me to focus on the tourist destinations, along the interstate. The Waco Inn is pretty far off the beaten track.”
“But Tatum Buford, who owns the Waco Inn, was the person who gave me this idea. At the Rotary Club luncheon. He said, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if someone looked to see what was in the local lost and founds at summer’s end? I think it would be.’ ”
“Oh, it was a great idea in concept. But sometimes even good ideas don’t pan out.”
“Sure, if you just sit at your desk, making phone calls. You should go and ask to see the contents. Feet on the street, Marissa, feet on the street.” It was one of Lou’s favorite expressions, as mysterious in origin as the black beans.
“At every motel?”
“At every motel.”
“What if they won’t show me?”
“They have to, by law. Freedom of speech. Look, don’t forget the five W’s—they work, Marissa. You know what they say—no stupid questions!”
Marissa was pretty sure that the First Amendment did not apply in this situation and that there were plenty of stupid questions. But she resigned herself to spending a day or two visiting every motel in Waco and asking to see the lost-and-found boxes.
Lou tottered off, smoothing her too-tight skirt down over her hips. Lou was Louisa Busbee Baker, the first female city editor at the Waco paper. She had worked there her entire career, as she frequently reminded Marissa, starting in 1967 as a clerk in the features section—it was called Brazos Living, after the river that ran through town. She had moved up from taking paid wedding announcements to reporter, then to editor of Brazos Living and, for five years now, city editor. She was the only woman in management on the news side, a fact she frequently referred to. “As the only woman…” She favored tight skirts and high heels, although she always seemed uncertain in the latter. The general impression was of someone who used to be a knockout and didn’t realize that her knockout days were behind her. Lou was, by Marissa’s calculations, at least thirty-eight.
Marissa started on the interstate frontage road, where the motels were close together and she could cover a lot of ground. She had already interviewed clerks at almost every one, but no one seemed to remember her or the conversation, so she had to go through her spiel all over again. Perhaps they were as bored as she was on this despairingly hot August day. At any rate, they either brought out the box of left-behind clothing immediately or asked the manager for permission to do so, in which case the manager, also bored, did the honors.
The boxes themselves were remarkably the same from motel to motel, almost as if they had a single supplier, or as if there were state regulations stipulating what could be used as a lost-and-found box at a motel. Plain cardboard, beginning to sag and soften in that way that cardboard does over time.
The contents, too, were similar. Clothes and more clothes, an occasional paperback, usually a romance.
The young clerk at the Motel 6 said: “Off the record?”
Marissa thought that hilarious. Off the record. As if this were Watergate, which was part of the reason she was a journalist. It was the reason that almost everyone in her generation had become a journalist. Follow the money, bring down a president. That was what she should be doing, not staring into a cardboard box of dirty clothes.
“Sure.”
“You’re not going to find anything good.”
Tell me something I don’t know. “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to my boss. She seems to think I’m going to find, like, bowling balls or a live alligator if I ask the right questions.”
“No, I mean—the valuable stuff, jewelry and the like, it’s not going to be in the lost and found, not for long. It may never even get to the box. The maids get first crack, and you can’t blame them for taking what they find. People are pigs. The nicest-looking people will do things you can’t believe to a motel room.” Actually, Marissa could believe it. “But even if someone does do the right thing and brings an item in, the boss lets them keep it if no one calls within a week. That’s why it’s all crap clothes and pantyhose. No one wants this stuff, not even the people who once owned it.”
Marissa wondered if there was a story in this. Rampant thievery at Waco motels. But given that Lou had gotten this hot tip from a motel guy at the Rotary Club, that idea probably wouldn’t be met with much favor.
Lou got most of her ideas from lunches and associates and neighbors. She didn’t seem to have a life outside the paper. She didn’t seem to read the paper, either, and often assigned stories that had already been published. On the rare occasions she had ideas of her own, it was because she had been jostled by a pothole or seen a billboard on the way to work. Many of Lou’s black beans began: Saw a sign on the way to work today, which got me to thinking…
The most frequent supplier of Lou’s ideas, if one could call them ideas, was the man who owned the Mexican restaurant on the traffic circle, where Lou went every Friday and had the taco salad with exactly one frozen margarita. She was very proud of that frozen margarita, which was why her staff knew about it. She seemed to think it signaled a wild streak, a Front Page/His Girl Friday type of devil-may-care shenanigans. Drinking! At lunch! But the frozen margarita at that restaurant was about as potent as a Slurpee.
The young reporters liked to drink beer and shots at a bar near the newspaper, a dive-y place called Pat’s Idle Hour. Even as they sat there, drinking cheap beer and complaining about their bosses, they knew that one day they would enjoy telling people about Pat’s Idle Hour, where the clientele ran to VA patients and the jukebox played Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls.” The young reporters were hyperconscious of the camp factor in their lives, the dives and the aptly named diners, the hilarious items at the flea market on the traffic circle, the bowling shirts and vintage dresses discovered at yard sales, although the elderly widows of Waco were surprisingly savvy about the value of their Depression-era china.
“She hates me,” Marissa said that afternoon, as the young staffers closed out the week at Pat’s Idle Hour, drinking the cheapest and best beers of their lives. To her horror, no one contradicted her.
“She doesn’t have any reason to hate me,” she tried again.
“Well,” Beth said, “you are cute.”
“So are you,” Marissa said with automatic courtesy. Beth was cute. Cute was exactly what Beth was. She was the kind of girl who never lacked for a boyfriend. In fact, her boyfriends usually overlapped by a little. Marissa was attractive in a different way, sultry and exotic. Most of the men she met here thought she was Mexican, but she was a quarter Lebanese, on her mother’s side.
“You’re totally cute,” she repeated to Beth for emphasis. “And so is Veronica. So how can that be the problem?”
“Hey—thanks,” Veronica said, caught off-guard by the compliment. She was a pretty girl, if slightly overweight and in need of better clothes.
The two guys in their group, John and Jonathan, wisely kept their own counsel.
“Lou doesn’t have the intellectual discipline to hate more than one person. She has a favorite”—Beth indicated Jonathan, who, not being a girl, simply nodded, acknowledging the truth. “And she has an unfavorite. That’s you, for now. But it will change. I think it’s just her personality. Which is to say, her lack of personality. She doesn’t know who she is, so she fixates on the person she envies. You’re cute, you went to a really good college back east, you drive that amazing car that your parents gave you for graduation.”
“That amazing car,” Marissa reminded Beth, “doesn’t have air-conditioning. Because my parents never thought I’d end up in Texas and neither did I. Especially not Waco, Texas, for God’s sake. My parents thought I was going to Yale Law School, which I turned down to go into journalism.”
John nodded. “Yes, we know. You went to Williams, you got into Yale, you have parents who will pay the full freight if you decide to abandon journalism and go to law school. We all know. And Lou knows. Lou knows that you have complete and utter disdain for the place where she has spent her entire adult life, since arriving at Baylor when she was eighteen. Lou grew up in Rosebud, Texas. Waco is the big city to her.”
“We all want out,” Marissa said. “Not a single person sitting here wants to work for this paper one more goddamn day than necessary.”
“True,” Jonathan said. “But the rest of us are a little more diplomatic about that fact.”
Easy for Jonathan to be so lofty. The cop reporter, he had the best story of the summer so far, a suspected homicide, juicy by local standards. A Baylor coed had been found in a ditch off Robinson Road about a month ago. Although there were strange markings on her—the sheriff’s office was being deliberately vague about just what they were—the cause of death had not yet been determined and was awaiting a more thorough autopsy down in Austin. But the death of a Baylor student was a big deal, under any circumstance, even a drunk-driving accident.
“That’s so unfair,” Marissa said, even as she hoped Jonathan was right about the source of her disfavor. Because she could change her attitude, if that was all Lou held against her. She could be kinder, sweeter. She could pretend wild enthusiasm for Lou’s black beans. She could stop mentioning that she had given up Yale Law School for “all of this,” waving her hand at the small newsroom, the town beyond. She had, come to think of it, said that more than once.
On Monday, newly energized, she attacked her list of remaining motels, the drives longer now that the motels were farther apart. By 11 a.m., her seat belt had left a wet stripe across her dress and her hair looked a wreck from driving with the windows open. It was the penultimate day of August and Lou wanted the story for next weekend, which would be Labor Day. Back at school, the days would already be pleasant, the nights verging on cool. Marissa had arrived in Waco with fifteen Fair Isle sweaters, sweaters that remained in boxes of mothballs. With only one motel to go by lunchtime, she decided to reward herself for her thoroughness with a coconut milk shake at the ironically named Health Camp, a burger place on the traffic circle. It wasn’t far from Lou’s beloved Mexican restaurant, but it was a Monday. Lou would never drink a frozen margarita on a Monday.
Marissa preferred her margaritas on the rocks, at a bar on the river that thought it was cool. She was having what her friends back home called a Looking for Mr. Goodbar phase, which made her something of a throwback, but then—Waco was something of a throwback. Her friends in Waco didn’t know what she did on weekday nights after work. Beth, who had never been without a boyfriend, would have been shocked, Veronica worried, John and Jonathan tantalized. Besides, what could be safer than picking up men in Waco? The men that Marissa allowed to take her home for a night were, for the most part, wildly grateful. Almost every one said he wanted to see her again, but she gave them fake names and numbers, cut them dead if she encountered them again. Her pickups were Baylor boys and cowboys and Rotarians. They made her feel sophisticated, in her vintage black sundress and high-heeled sandals, her sunglasses up on her head. It was a heady sensation for someone like Marissa, who until arriving in Waco had had sex with exactly two men, both long-term college boyfriends, the second of whom had broken her heart when he made it clear, rather late in the game, that he didn’t want her to follow him to Columbia’s j-school, or even to New York.
But it was surprisingly hard work, getting these men to take her home. Most of them had to get drunk first, really drunk. After the first encounter, Marissa decided never to get into a man’s car again, that the drive was the real risk. She followed them to shitty off-campus apartments and depressing duplexes and apartments that looked like cheap motel rooms and sometimes actual motel rooms. “Are you on the Pill?” every single one asked, usually just seconds before, hovering above her. “Are you on the Pill?”
She was.
One man had not asked, had not said much of anything. He’d also needed the least persuasion, instructing her after one drink to follow him to a motel room. Once there, he posed her, he told her what to do, still using as few words as possible. She found herself doing whatever he wanted, and he wanted some unusual things. Of all the men she had been with, he was the one she would have liked to see again. But no matter how many times she went to the bar along the river, he never showed up again. He said his name was Charlie, but that wasn’t how he signed the register when they pretended, for the benefit of the night clerk, to be newlyweds who had driven up I-35 from Nuevo Laredo.
Fortified by a coconut milk shake and an order of onion rings, Marissa headed to the last motel on her list, the Waco Inn. A dull panic began to set in as she drove, because she had now spent two days on this assignment and had established only that she was right and Lou was wrong, which Lou would find particularly unforgivable.
At the Waco Inn, the manager showed her the usual collection of abandoned clothes, stained and torn and smelly clothes so awful that it was possible to imagine someone checking into a motel just to get rid of them.
“There’s one more item, but the owner keeps it in his office safe.”
“It must be valuable,” Marissa said.
“Oh, it is. I’ll ask Tatum if he wants to show it to you.”
Ah, yes, Tatum, the Rotarian who had suggested the story to Lou, probably inspired by this very item, thinking it would bring publicity to his not-very-nice motel, whose customers were seldom tourists.
“I can’t imagine someone leaving a beauty like this behind,” Tatum said, lifting a black leather belt with a heavy silver-and-turquoise buckle from his safe. It was the first item of value that Marissa had seen in all her travels. Not to her taste, not at all, but clearly expensive.
“About four weeks.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t let someone on staff take it.”
Marissa expected the owner to deny the practice of divvying up the lost-and-found spoils. Instead, he said: “No one on the staff has the initials CB.”
She took the belt in her hands. It was the first time she had touched it, but not the first time it had touched her. She remembered it around her wrists, her throat, and, later, its brisk strokes on her back and ass, stinging but not hurting. “You are a very bad girl,” the man she knew as Charlie told her in a low, strangely dispassionate voice. He didn’t really hurt her. That was his gift. That was why she wanted to see him again. He knew how to take a girl right up to the edge, how to make sex scary, but not too scary. He had very dark hair and lots of it—on his head, on his forearms, on his muscled legs, on his chest, but not on his back. He had tightened that belt around her neck and she had let him, never the least bit tempted to tell him to stop, trusting him to anticipate the perfect moment. No, she couldn’t be wrong. It was the same belt. But then—it was the same motel. Four weeks. It had been five weeks since Marissa had been here with him. Five weeks and five days. Five weeks and five days of going back to the bar by the river, but he was never there. She traced the initials on the buckle. CB.
“They call us the buckle on the Bible Belt.” That was what one editor after another said to Marissa the day she interviewed for the job at the Waco Times. The executive editor, the managing editor, the assistant managing editor, and, finally, Lou. They seemed to be warning her, or at least challenging her commitment. But Marissa needed a job and she had started the hunt late, given that she’d thought she would be at Columbia in the fall, getting a master’s in journalism alongside her boyfriend, with whom she had worked on the college paper. But he didn’t want her there. And Columbia didn’t want her there, which was almost as hurtful. Marissa decided to get a real newspaper job, show her ex that she was ready to do what he was only studying.
“They call us the buckle on the Bible Belt, Marissa. A little sleepy for young people, but it’s a great place to raise a family.”
The male editors all had families. Only Lou, married to her high school sweetheart, did not. The gossip was that Lou had the steady job in her household, that her husband called himself a developer but was just a man with a lot of raw land south of town.
The Waco Inn’s owner, Tatum Buford, father of this bastard black bean, reached for the buckle, but Marissa did not surrender it. “I’m surprised you didn’t try to find the owner.”
“We did,” Tatum said. “But he paid cash, and the name in the register, it wasn’t with these initials.”
“And when did you say this was?” Marissa asked.
“Four weeks ago. Maybe three. But no more than a month.”
Five weeks and five days. When he was done, he stood up and she watched from the bed as he dressed, fastening the buckle, tucking in his shirt. “See you around,” he said, and she had taken those words to heart. She didn’t care that he had ripped her dress under the armhole; the seams in old dresses gave way sometimes. She didn’t care that he spoke so little. She didn’t care if he was married, raising a family in this town that was so good for families. She assumed he was married. But she couldn’t imagine why he didn’t want her again. Had she been too compliant, too eager? Should she have fought more, pretended fear? If she could find him again, she’d do it however he wanted.
“You should let me photograph this for my story,” Marissa told Tatum Buford.
“Shouldn’t I pose with it? A photo of a belt is awful plain.”
“Oh, yes. But we’ll need a studio shot, too, and that has to be done at the office, with proper lighting.”
“You’ll bring it back? After it’s photographed?”
“Of course,” Marissa said.
She often made such blithe promises, only three months into what she thought would be her career. She promised to give back photographs, scrapbooks, any and all artifacts that were beloved by their owners, of no consequence to her. She promised to inquire how someone might buy a photograph once it was in the paper. Sometimes she did, and sometimes she didn’t, but it never worried her. It was just something she said, in order to get what she wanted. That was what reporters did. They said whatever it took, to get what they wanted.
In this case, she knew she wouldn’t bring the belt back. Because in this case, the man who owned the belt would call her and she would give it to him, face to face. Face to face.
“The silver has tarnished. You ought to shine it up for the photograph,” Buford said.
“I will,” Marissa said. “I will.”
She took it back to the newspaper, excited to have found a way into the story she had been trying to kill. When Lou came out of the afternoon meeting, Marissa was waiting at her office door, a puppy dog who had finally learned to play fetch. Here’s the stick! Love me! Pet me! Say I’m your favorite!
Lou just looked at the belt and said, “Come on in.”
Her office was small, windowless, without much in the way of personal touches, quite unlike the offices of her male colleagues, which were filled with evidence of the families that thrived in Waco. The young women who worked for Lou surmised that she believed she was not entitled to a private life, or even photographs of one. Lou had to prove, every day, that her head was in the game.
Lou turned the buckle over and over in her hand while Marissa talked about how it was the only interesting thing she had uncovered, that it would be better to focus on the discovery of this one beautiful object, that the owner might come forward and then they would have another story.
“From the Waco Inn?” Lou asked. “And the belt’s owner never called and the motel didn’t call him?”
“No, he never called and there’s been—some screwup. They’re not sure who left it there. The maid forgot to write down the room number. Or she didn’t turn it in right away. I’ll have to check my notes on that one detail.”
“And they couldn’t match it to the initials in the register?”
“No, but it could be an heirloom. The man might not even have those initials.”
“It’s tarnished,” Lou said, tapping it with a manicured finger.
It was. “I need to shine it, I guess.”
“Yes, you do that.”
Marissa did. She polished the belt, she polished her story and turned it in, structuring it like a mystery, a safe one, the kind of breathless tale that the Happy Hollisters might take on. The assistant city editor thought it was good, for what it was. But the story didn’t run and it didn’t run and it didn’t run. September continued hot; it felt like summer to her. Suddenly it was October, which was hot, too. When she finally asked Lou when they were going to run her story, Lou said: “Oh, it doesn’t feel timely anymore.”
“What?”
“Summer’s over. We don’t have a hook.”
“It’s really not so much about the lost-and-found boxes, the end of summer, not anymore. It’s about this beautiful belt left at a seedy motel, whether it will be reunited with the owner.”
“The Waco Inn isn’t seedy. It’s just—fighting a tough location. Tatum’s doing what he can to bring it along. He’s even going to add a Continental breakfast.”
“Still, if we could reunite this buckle with its owner—”
“That’s another thing. How are we going to evaluate the claims that come in? Any man with the initials CB could say he owned this and how would we prove he didn’t? I don’t know, Marissa, you did a good job, but I was wrong. It’s not a story.”
“What should I do with the belt?”
“Tell photo to send it back.” But photo had lost the belt, as it turned out.
Unexpectedly, Marissa stopped being Lou’s unfavorite about this time. The steady diet of black beans went to Veronica now, poor thing. Marissa even got to share a byline on Jonathan’s story, when the state police lab determined that the girl in the ditch had a blood alcohol level of .02 but death had been caused by strangulation. The rape kit had been ambiguous—evidence of sex, but not force.
One day, an almost autumnal Friday, Marissa had a hankering for taco salad and talked Beth into going to the Mexican place, despite knowing that Lou would be there with her one frozen margarita. Veronica, firmly entrenched as the unfavorite, wanted no part of the escapade, but Beth agreed. The taco salad was a good one, the bottom of the shell-bowl giving way at just the right moment, the perfect combination of crunch and moisture.
Lou was alone with her margarita and they waved at her warily, fearful she would summon them for company, but she didn’t seem at all interested in them. A few minutes later, a man joined her. A dark-haired man, very thick hair combed straight back from a widow’s peak.
“Damn,” Beth said, “I’d be the breadwinner, too, if I could go home to that. Even with that werewolf hair.”
Marissa watched as Lou drank three margaritas that day, then led her companion out of the restaurant, giggling girlishly. She stopped by their table on the way out. Bumped it, actually, with her hip, miscalculating how much space she took up.
“Girls, I don’t think I’ve ever met my husband. I mean”—another fit of giggles—“I don’t think y’all have ever met my husband. Charlie, this is Beth and Ma—Ma—”
“Marissa,” she supplied, staring at the man’s midsection. At his belt.
“Weekenders due by two, girls, to make the bulldog,” Lou said. “Hank is editing, though. I’m going to take the afternoon off. I don’t feel so good.”
She winked at them. Beth would regale the others for weeks about that wink, but Marissa never joined in the laughter.
Charlie Baker nodded at Marissa and Beth, courtly and regal. “You be good to my wife, girls. Treat her right. She’s very precious to me.”
Lou wobbled out of the restaurant, Charlie steady in her wake.
A few weeks later, a black bean appeared in Marissa’s mailbox.
Marissa, Tatum Buford has done such a good job fixing up the Waco Inn. How about a little profile on him for the Sunday paper? Don’t forget to mention the Continental breakfast. Best, Lou.
On her way to the Waco Inn, Marissa took a detour down Robinson Road, finding the spot where the Baylor girl’s body had been dumped. The road, also known as US-Texas 77, eventually led to Rosebud, home of Lou Busbee Baker. And, by inference, home of her husband, Charlie Baker, her high school sweetheart, a man who took girls to the Waco Inn and wrapped a belt around their necks until they told him to stop.
Maybe he didn’t always stop.
Marissa turned around, but instead of driving to the Waco Inn, she went to her apartment, a dowdy duplex full of secondhand furniture. She put everything she owned into her car, just piled it in willy-nilly, and began driving north, then east. Five hours later, she called her notice in to the night assistant editor, Hank, from Texarkana, making sure she was on the Arkansas side of the line. She then called her parents in Philadelphia and said she wanted to start law school that January, if possible. And if she had to defer until next fall, then she wanted to work at her father’s office, doing whatever she could to be useful.
She sat in her motel room, hugging her knees, shivering despite the chugging space heater beneath the window. Follow the money. Follow the belt buckle. A motel owner finds a belt with a distinctive buckle, one that he recognizes, evidence of nothing more than an indiscretion. He makes sure that an editor at the newspaper knows that he has it. But he couldn’t know what had happened, why a man might leave a room in such haste that he would forget his belt. And Lou can’t know, either. Can she? The husband, reunited with his belt, forgiven by his wife, will be more careful in the future. Won’t he? It was an accident. Wasn’t it? There are no stupid questions, Lou had told her. But there are terrifying ones.
When Marissa checked out the next morning, she left some of her clothes behind. Not the ones she had been wearing the day before, but a vintage black sundress with a ripped seam and a pair of high-heeled sandals. Let them end up in the lost and found, in a sagging cardboard box, where they could keep company with all the other things that were torn and stained and shameful.